Finally! --Clear guidance on how to teach reading, writing, and spelling. One of the most important tasks teachers and homeschool parents face in the early grades is teaching students the fundamental language skills that underlie all future learning. Fortunately, there is a guide to traversing this territory: The Roadmap to Literacy. This book presents the key phases students must master to become literate. The Roadmap to Literacy introduces these phases and provides: The essential concepts and skills that students need to learn in each phase, including an entire section on Phonics Rules Key pitfalls to avoid Ideas to introduce new concepts in an imaginative and lively way Fun and effective practice activities to help students solidify skills Comprehensive lesson planning Easy ways to assess the program's efficacy How to handle common remedial issues The Roadmap to Literacy provides educators and parents all of the information necessary to teach their students the skills of reading, writing, grammar, and spelling so that they will be able to meet the demands of the upper grades--and beyond.

The Roadmap to Literacy Renewal of Literacy Edition is a reading, writing, and language arts program for Waldorf schools grades 1-3.

Outstanding Book Award, Conference on College Composition and Communication "We are only beginning to recognize the global forces that have long shaped literacy in the United States. What we need now is a book that demonstrates how to theorize U.S. literacy with regard to globalization’s complex legacy. Writing from These Roots satisfies this need, and then some. Duffy’s careful representation of Hmong literacy narratives is a remarkable accomplishment in its own right, not least for the respect he shows the women and men whose stories enable him to delineate personal, cultural, and national pathways to literacy. In also documenting Hmong people’s transnational pathway to literacy in the United States, Duffy expertly details the rhetorical means by which literacy can make legible the self-fashioning of distinct identities against a historical backdrop bleached by generations of assimilationist public policy and racist discourse. Duffy’s insistence that we think rhetorically about literacy is a call that will resonate in literacy scholarship for years to come." —Peter Mortensen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Writing from These Roots is without doubt a major, original, and important work. Fittingly, for a book that conceptualizes its topics and themes globally and comparatively, it will attract an international audience." —Harvey J. Graff, The Ohio State University "This is a fascinating and important study that is rich in theoretical insight about literacy and has an informed and detailed account of the Hmong experience in Laos and the United States." —Franklin Ng, California State University, Fresno Writing from These Roots documents the historical development of literacy in a Midwestern American community of Laotian Hmong, a people who came to the United States as refugees from the Vietnam War and whose language had no widely accepted written form until one created by missionary-linguists was adopted in the late twentieth century by Hmong in Laos and, later, the U.S. and other Western nations. As such, the Hmong have often been described as "preliterates," "nonliterates," or members of an "oral culture." Although such terms are problematic, it is nevertheless true that the majority of Hmong did not read or write in any language when they arrived in the U.S. For this reason, the Hmong provide a unique opportunity to study the forces that influence the development of reading and writing abilities in cultures in which writing is not widespread and to do so within the context of the political, economic, religious, military, and migratory upheavals classified broadly as "globalization."

Compelling and highly engaging, this text shows teachers at all levels how to do critical literacy in the classroom and provides models for practice that can be adapted to any context. Integrating social theory and classroom practice, it brings critical literacy to life as a socio-cultural orientation to the teaching of literacy that takes seriously the relationship between language and power and orients readers to the social effects of texts. Students and teachers are drawn into the key questions critical readers need to pose of texts: Whose interests are served, who benefits, who is disadvantaged; who is included and who is excluded? The practical activities help readers grasp complex issues. Extending the theoretical framework in Hilary Janks’ Literacy and Power with a rich range of completely new, up-to-date activities that translate theory into practice, Doing Critical Literacy is powerful, relevant, and useful for both pre- and in-service teacher education and for use in schools.